Nora Webster: A Novel

by Colm Toibin

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  Bríd Tóibín (1921–2000)

  Niall Tóibín (1959–2004)

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You must be fed up of them. Will they never stop coming?” Tom O’Connor, her neighbour, stood at his front door and looked at her, waiting for a response.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Just don’t answer the door. That’s what I’d do.”

  Nora closed the garden gate.

  “They mean well. People mean well,” she said.

  “Night after night,” he said. “I don’t know how you put up with it.”

  She wondered if she could get back into the house without having to answer him again. He was using a new tone with her, a tone he would never have tried before. He was speaking as though he had some authority over her.

  “People mean well,” she said again, but saying it this time made her feel sad, made her bite her lip to keep the tears back. When she caught Tom O’Connor’s eye, she knew that she must have appeared put down, defeated. She went into the house.

  That night a knock came at almost eight o’clock. There was a fire lighting in the back room and the two boys were doing their homework at the table.

  “You answer it,” Donal said to Conor.

  “No, you do.”

  “One of you answer it,” she said.

  Conor, the younger one, went out to the hall. She could hear a voice when he opened the door, a woman’s voice, but not one that she recognised. Conor ushered the visitor into the front room.

  “It’s the little woman who lives in Court Street,” he whispered to her when he came into the back room.

  “Which little woman?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  May Lacey shook her head sadly when Nora came into the front room.

  “Nora, I waited until now. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Maurice.”

  She reached out and held Nora’s hand.

  “And he was so young. I knew him when he was a little boy. We knew them all in Friary Street.”

  “Take off your coat and come into the back room,” Nora said. “The boys are doing their exercise, but they can move in here and turn on the electric fire. They’ll be going to bed soon anyway.”

  May Lacey, wisps of thin grey hair appearing from under her hat, her scarf still around her neck, sat opposite Nora in the back room and began to talk. After a while, the boys went upstairs; Conor, when Nora called him, was too shy to come down and say good night, but soon Donal came and sat in the room with them, carefully studying May Lacey, saying nothing.

  It was clear now that no one else would call. Nora was relieved that she would not have to entertain people who did not know each other, or people who did not like each other.

  “So anyway,” May Lacey went on, “Tony was in the hospital bed in Brooklyn, and didn’t this man arrive into the bed beside his, and they got talking, and Tony knew he was Irish, and he told him his wife was from the County Wexford.”

  She stopped and pursed her lips, as though she was trying to remember something. Suddenly, she began to imitate a man’s voice: “Oh, and that’s where I’m from, the man said, and then Tony said she was from Enniscorthy, oh and that’s where I’m from too, the man said. And he asked Tony what part of Enniscorthy she was from, and Tony said she was from Friary Street.”

  May Lacey kept her eyes fixed on Nora’s face, forcing her to express interest and surprise.

  “And the man said that’s where I’m from too. Isn’t that extraordinary!”

  She stopped, waiting for a reply.

  “And he told Tony that before he left the town he made that iron thing—what would you call it?—a grille or a guard on the windowsill there at Gerry Crane’s. And I went down to look at it and it’s there all right. Gerry didn’t know how it got there or when. But the man beside Tony in the bed in Brooklyn, he said that he made it, he was a welder. Isn’t that a coincidence? To happen in Brooklyn.”

  Nora made tea as Donal went to bed. She brought it into the back room on a tray with biscuits and cake. When they had fussed over the tea things, May Lacey sipped her tea and began to talk again.

  “Of course, all of mine thought the world of Maurice. They always asked for him in their letters. He was friends with Jack before Jack left. And of course Maurice was a great teacher. The boys looked up to him. I always heard that said.”

  Looking into the fire, Nora tried to think back, wondering if May Lacey had ever been in this house before. She thought not. She had known her all her life, like so many in the town, to greet and exchange pleasantries with, or to stop and talk to if there was news. She knew the story of her life down to her maiden name and the plot in the graveyard where she would be buried. Nora had heard her singing once at a concert, she remembered her reedy soprano—it was “Home Sweet Home” or “Oft in the Stilly Night,” one of those songs.

  She did not think that May Lacey went out much except to the shops, or to mass on Sundays.

  They were silent now, and Nora thought that maybe May would go soon.

  “It’s nice of you to come up and see me,” she said.

  “Oh, Nora, I was very sorry for you, but I felt I’d wait, I didn’t want to be crowding in on you.”

  She refused more tea, and when Nora went to the kitchen with the tray she thought that May might stand up and put on her coat, but she did not move from the chair. Nora went upstairs and checked that the boys were asleep. She smiled to herself at the thought of going to bed herself now, falling asleep and leaving May Lacey down below, staring into the fire, waiting for her in vain.

  “Where are the girls?” May asked as soon as Nora sat down. “I never see them now, they used to pass up and down all the time.”

  “Aine is in school in Bunclody. She’s settling in there now,” Nora said. “And Fiona is doing her teacher training in Dublin.”

  “You’d miss them when they go away,” May Lacey said. “I miss them all, I do, but it’s funny, of all of them, it’s Eily I think about most, although I miss Jack too. There was something, I don’t know, I just didn’t want to lose Eily. I thought after Rose died—you know all this, Nora—that she would come home and stay and she’d find some sort of job here, and then one day when she was just back a week or two I noticed her all quiet and it wasn’t like her, and she started to cry at the table, and that’s when we heard the news that her fellow in New York wouldn’t let her come home unless she married him. And she had married him there without telling any of us. ‘Well, that’s that, Eily, then,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to go back to him, so.’ And I couldn’t face her or speak to her, and she sent me photographs of him and her together in New York, but I couldn’t look at them. They were the last thing in the world I wanted to see. But I was always sorry she didn’t stay.”

  “Yes, I was sorry to hear that she went back, but maybe she’s happy there,” Nora said and immediately wondered, as May Lacey looked down sadly, a hurt expression on her face, if that was a wrong thing to say.

  May Lacey began to rummage in her handbag. She put on a pair of reading glasses.

  “I thought I’d brought Jack’s letter but I must have left it behind,” she said.

  She examined a piece of paper and then another.

  “No
, I haven’t got it. I wanted to show it to you. There was something he wanted to ask you.”

  Nora said nothing. She had not seen Jack Lacey for more than twenty years.

  “Maybe I’ll find the letter and send it to you,” May said.

  She stood up to go.

  “I don’t think he’s going to come home now,” she said as she put on her coat. “What would he do here? They have their life there in Birmingham, and they’ve invited me over and everything, but I told Jack I’d be happy to go to my reward without seeing England. I think though he’d like to have something here, a place he could visit and maybe Eily’s children or some of the others.”

  “Well, he has you to visit,” Nora said.

  “He thought you’d be selling Cush,” May said, settling her scarf. She spoke as though it were nothing, but now, as she looked at Nora, her gaze was hard and concentrated and her chin began to tremble.

  “He asked me if you’d be selling it,” she said and closed her mouth firmly.

  “I’ve made no plans,” Nora said.

  May pursed her lips again. She did not move.

  “I wish I’d brought the letter,” she said. “Jack always loved Cush and Ballyconnigar. He used to go with Maurice and the others, and he always remembered it. And it hasn’t changed much, everyone there would know him. The last time he came home he didn’t know half the people in the town.”

  Nora said nothing. She wanted May to leave.

  “I’ll tell him I mentioned it to you anyway. That’s all I can do.”

  When Nora did not reply, May looked at her, clearly annoyed at her silence. They walked out and stood in the hall.

  “Time is the great healer, Nora. That’s all I can tell you. And I can tell you that from experience.”

  She sighed as Nora opened the front door.

  “Thank you for calling up, May,” Nora said.

  “Good night now, Nora, and look after yourself.”

  Nora watched her as she made her way slowly down along the footpath towards home.

  She drove to Cush in the old A40 one Saturday that October, leaving the boys playing with friends and telling no one where she was going. Her aim in those months, autumn leading to winter, was to manage for the boys’ sake and maybe her own sake too to hold back tears. Her crying as though for no reason frightened the boys and disturbed them as they gradually became used to their father not being there. She realised now that they had come to behave as if everything were normal, as if nothing were really missing. They had learned to disguise how they felt. She, in turn, had learned to recognise danger signs, thoughts that would lead to other thoughts. She measured her success with the boys by how much she could control her feelings.

  As she drove down the hill outside The Ballagh and caught her first glimpse of the sea, it occurred to her that she had never been alone before on this road. In all the years, one of the boys, or the girls when they were younger, would shout out “I can see the sea” just here and she would have to make them sit down and quieten.

  In Blackwater, she thought of stopping for cigarettes or chocolate or anything to postpone her arrival at Cush. But she was sure that someone she knew would see her and want to sympathize with her. The words came easily: “I’m sorry” or “I’m sorry for your trouble.” They all said the same thing, but there was no formula for replying. “I know” or “Thank you” sounded cold, almost hollow. And they would stand looking at her until she could not wait to get away from them. There was something hungry in the way they held her hand or looked into her eyes. She wondered if she had ever done this to anybody, and thought that she had not. As she turned right towards Ballyconnigar she realised that she would feel much worse if people began to avoid her. It struck her that they were probably doing so, but she had not noticed.

  The sky had darkened now and drops of rain hit the windscreen. It seemed much barer here, more wintry than the countryside on the road to Blackwater. She turned left at the ball alley for Cush and she allowed herself the brief respite of imagining that this was some time in the recent past, a dark summer’s day with a threatening sky and she had gone into Blackwater for meat and bread and a newspaper. She had thrown them lightly on the back seat, and the family were all in the house beside the marl-pond, Maurice and the children, and maybe one or two friends with them, and the children had slept late, and they would be disappointed now that the sun was not shining, but it wouldn’t stop them playing rounders or messing in front of the house or going to the strand. But if the rain was down for the day, of course, they’d stay in and play cards until the two boys would grow irritable and come to her to complain.

  She let herself imagine all of this for as long as she liked. But as soon as she caught a view of the sea and the horizon beyond the Corrigans’ roof, such imaginings were no use to her, she was back in the hard world again.

  She drove the car down the lane and unlocked the large galvanised gates. She parked in front of the house and closed the gates again so that no one could see the car. She would have loved it had one of her old friends been here, Carmel Redmond or Lily Devereux, who could talk to her sensibly not about what she had lost or how sorry they were, but about the children, money, part-time work, how to live now. They would have listened to her. But Carmel lived in Dublin and only came in the summer and just Lily came from time to time to see her mother.

  Nora sat back into the car as the wind from the sea howled around her. The house would be cold. She should have taken a heavier coat with her. She knew that wishing friends were with her or allowing herself to shiver in the car like this were ways of postponing the moment when she would have to open the door and walk into the empty house.

  And then an even fiercer whistling wind blew up and seemed as though it would lift the car. Something she had not allowed herself to think before but had known for some days now came into her mind and she made a promise to herself. She would not come here again. This was the last time she would visit this house. She would go in now and walk through these few rooms. She would take with her whatever was personal and could not be left behind, and then she would close this door and drive back to the town, and, in future, she would never take that turn at the ball alley on the road between Blackwater and Ballyconnigar.

  What surprised her was the hardness of her resolve, how easy it seemed to turn her back on what she had loved, leave this house on the lane to the cliff for others to know, for others to come to in the summer and fill with different noises. As she sat looking out at the bruised sky over the sea, she sighed. Finally, she let herself feel how much she had lost, how much she would miss. She got out of the car, steadying herself against the wind.

  The front door opened on to a tiny hall. There were two rooms on each side, the rooms on the left with bunk beds, a living room on the right with a tiny kitchen and bathroom behind it, and their room beside it, peaceful, away from the children.

  Each year in early June they came here, all of them, on a Saturday and Sunday, even if the weather was not good. They brought scrubbing brushes and mops and detergent and cloths for cleaning windows. They brought mattresses that had been well aired. It was a turning point, a mark on the calendar that meant the beginning of summer, even if summer was going to be grey and misty. The children, in the years she wanted to remember now, were noisy and excited at the start, as though they were an American family from The Donna Reed Show. They imitated American accents and gave each other instructions, but they soon grew tired and bored and she let them play or go down to the strand or walk into the village. And this was when the serious work began. When the children were out of the way, Maurice could do things like paint the woodwork, use distemper on the cement; the lino on a floor could be covered in the places where there were holes and she could patch the wallpaper where there was mould or too many stains, and for this she would need silence and concentration. She enjoyed measuring down to the last fraction of an inch, ma
king the paste to the right consistency, and cutting up bright new patches of wallpaper in floral patterns.

  Fiona hated spiders. That was something Nora remembered now. And cleaning the house meant, more than anything, displacing spiders and beetles and clocks and all types of creepy-crawlies. The boys loved Fiona screaming, and Fiona herself enjoyed screaming too, especially as her father would protect her with elaborate gestures. “Where is it?” he would shout, mimicking the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and Fiona would run to him and hold him.

  That was the past, then, she thought as she walked into the living room, and it cannot be rescued. The smallness and coldness of the room gave her an odd satisfaction now. There was clearly a leak in the galvanised tin roof because there was a fresh stain on the ceiling. The house rattled as a gust of wind brought a hard sheet of rain against the glass. The windows would have to be repaired soon, and the wood had begun to rot. And who knew how long it would take for the cliff to be eaten away as far back as here and their house to be dismantled on the orders of the county council? Someone else could worry now. Someone else could repair the leaks and treat the walls for damp. Someone else could rewire and repaint this house, or abandon it to the elements when the time came.

  She would sell it to Jack Lacey. Nobody who lived locally would want to buy it; they knew what a bad investment it would be, compared to houses in Bentley or Curracloe or Morriscastle. No one from Dublin who saw the house in this state would make an offer for it. She looked around the room and shuddered.

  She walked into the children’s bedrooms and into their own bedroom, and she knew that for Jack Lacey in Birmingham owning this would be a dream, part of a memory of scorching hot Sundays, and boys and girls on bicycles, and bright, open possibilities. On the other hand, she imagined him coming into the house in a year or two, when he was back for a fortnight in Ireland, with the ceiling half fallen in and cobwebs everywhere and the wallpaper peeling and the windows broken and the electricity cut off. And the summer’s day all drizzly and dark.